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Asian hurricane evacuees in U.S. neglected

Published Sep 24, 2005 7:14 PM

On the other side of Houston from the Astrodome, far from the official “shelter” there, nearly 15,000 Southeast Asian evacuees have congregated at the Hong Kong V Shopping Mall. Makeshift “camps” have been set up to assist survivors of Hurri cane Katrina who have been largely ignored by the Federal Emergency Manage ment Agency (FEMA) and the American Red Cross.

Most of the evacuees at the mall were forced to flee the devastation and floods from Hurricane Katrina on their own, without help from government agencies. No evacuation orders were translated for them. No buses were sent to pick them up.

The pattern of government neglect has not stopped; most are still stuck in Hous ton with no money and no place to go. An estimated 4,000 Vietnamese are still in Biloxi, Miss., crowded three families to a boat, their homes and cars washed away.

Workers World spoke with Au Huynh, a professional Vietnamese translator from Philadelphia. She and Temple University Law graduate Bao Nguyen paid their own way to Houston to volunteer with Boat People SOS, a national organization helping Vietnamese immigrants.

Huynh described the efforts of the local Houston Southeast Asian communities to provide food, clothing and volunteers to assist the many non-English-speaking evacuees applying for FEMA and Red Cross assistance.

“We are serving the same amount of people held at the Astrodome but with no services,” Huynh said. “We offered our ser vices to FEMA and the Red Cross to assist as translators, but were turned down.

“We never saw workers from FEMA or the Red Cross at the shopping mall to aid the South Asian evacuees,” she noted, “and when we went to a Baptist church where Red Cross workers were helping evacuees, the supervisor in charge refused to speak with us.”

Huynh sought help from a friend who works at the Philadelphia Daily News and who placed calls to the Red Cross in Houston on behalf of the newspaper. They assured him that workers would come to the mall. Over a week later, the promised aid had not materialized

Nguyen described the overwhelming problem of trying to reach FEMA by phone, which the Southeast Asian evacuees were forced to do because no FEMA workers would come to them with applications. “Volunteers took turns dialing the numbers. When we could get through we were put on hold. One time we forgot we were on hold, went to bed and came back to discover we were still on hold—19 hours later!”

Huynh and Nguyen expressed concern that evacuees were not hired to staff the phones. They learned that applications were handled by a private contractor from Bakersfield, Calif., using 900 phone operators who were paid $20 per hour after just two days of training. Meanwhile, evacuees sat in shelters with nothing to do and little means of support.

“The Red Cross has received millions of dollars in donations,” Huynh observed, “yet evacuees are given only $365 per person, capped at five people per household.”

When more than one family lived in a household, they had problems completing FEMA applications, which contained no provision for this. Nguyen noted that many of the people in the mall received letters from FEMA denying aid with no explanation. “There seemed to be a trend that those who lacked legal permanent residency status were turned down.”

“We never saw any federal assistance for these evacuees,” Huynh noted. “It was the people coming together and looking out for each other that made the difference. After everything they’ve gone through, they are still fighting.”